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Beyond Complaint: When Lament Leads to Praise Before experiencing a personal tragedy, Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff had abstract answers to one of the hardest questions of faith: why do God’s people suffer? But the abstract answers he worked out in philosophical proofs were of little use to him when his own adult son, Eric,...

A Flourishing City James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, and his wife, Deb, traveled 54,000 miles across America in a single-engine plane. Fallows wrote about the commonalities he noticed in healthy American cities. For one, there were local heroes in these cities, big and small. They also had downtowns, community colleges,...

God: Judge, Refiner, Remember-er One prolific writer has said that books are built on good beginnings and endings. The collection of books that comprise the Minor Prophets more than exceed this criteria for good endings! The twelve prophets—some of priestly or royal lineage, some of common vocation, some with little biographical information...

The Need for Forgiveness Martin Luther said, “Forgiveness is God’s command.” Though we may agree that forgiveness is a central principle of Christianity, we also often struggle to practice it. Many of us resist forgiving those who have hurt us. Why must we forgive? Why must we be forgiven? We’ll examine the biblical answers to those questions...

Forgiving Our Darkest Sins Sculptor Anish Kapoor bought the exclusive artistic rights to use the color considered the blackest shade of black on the planet. Called “Vantablack,” the hue is so dark that it absorbs 99.96 percent of light and helps hide satellites and stealth fighter jets from the naked eye. Our reading in Isaiah 43 describes...

The Price of Forgiveness The opening chapters of Genesis tell us that God created the world and everything in it—including the first man and woman—and declared His creation good. But the man and woman, Adam and Eve, were not content with God’s fellowship and provision, and they disobeyed His command not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge...

The Pain of Guilt To understand the blessing of forgiveness, we must acknowledge the pain of guilt. An article in Psychology Today titled “What Does Guilt Do?” claims that guilt is actually a valuable emotion because it helps us maintain ties to people in our community. The pain of guilt helps us realize when our actions damage our relationship...

The Unforgivable Sin It’s not uncommon to worry that we have committed a sin so terrible that God could not possibly forgive us. We’ve seen already throughout our study the reassurance from Scripture that God is willing and able to forgive our sin. Why then, in our reading today, does Jesus mention an unforgivable sin? What if we accidentally...

You Must Forgive Corrie ten Boom, who was arrested for concealing Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland, spoke at a church in Germany shortly after the war. After her talk, a man approached her. She recognized him as a guard at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp where her sister had died. He said, “Since that time, I have become a Christian.

The Guarantee of Forgiveness The words repent, repentance, and repented are mentioned more than 100 times in the Bible, from the Old Testament to the New Testament. The practice of repentance involves more than just feeling bad about what we have done. It means changing our path. It requires both acknowledging what we have done wrong and...